Find the Average of a group of numbers in Excel 2010

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You can easily find the Average of a group ...

Find the Average of a group of numbers in Excel 2010

Find the Average of a group of numbers in Excel 2010

You can easily find the Average of a group of numbers present in an Excel worksheet. To calculate the Average, the excel application provides two standard in-built functions namely, the AVERAGE and the AVERAGEIF functions.

The AVERAGE Function when used on a group of numbers returns the arithmetic mean of those numbers. The arithmetic mean is calculated by adding all the numbers present in a group and then dividing the result of that addition operation by the count of numbers present in that group. For example, the arithmetic Mean for a group of numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, 2 and 4 is calculated as (2+3+4+5+2+4)/6 where ‘6’ is the count of numbers present in the group.

To find the Average of Numbers present in a contiguous Column or Row

1) Click on the cell that is below or to the right of the group of numbers for which you want to calculate the Average.

Figure 1

2) Then, click on the “Home” tab and then under the Home tab, in the ’Editing’ category, click on the arrow of the ‘Sum’ icon and then click on the ‘Average’ function from the drop down list.

Figure 2

3) Now, the average of the group of numbers will be displayed in a cell under or below the group of numbers that you selected.

Figure 3

To find the Average of a group of numbers present in a Non-Contiguous Column or Row

To find the average of a group of numbers in a non-contiguous column or row, consider the example shown below. In this example we have a group of numbers present in cells A1 to A15. Here, we want to find the average of numbers present in cells A1 to A5 combined with the numbers present in cells A11 to A15.

Figure 4

To find the average of these numbers, you should use the AVERAGE formula as =AVERAGE(A1:A5,A11:A15) to obtain the correct Average of the group of numbers that you selected.

Figure 5

Figure 6

The AVERAGEIF function

You can use the AVERAGEIF function to calculate the Average of a group of numbers based on a particular condition. For example, if you wish to find the average of a group of numbers which are greater than only a particular number, then you can use the AVERAGEIF function to obtain the correct average based on the condition specified.

Consider a group of numbers as show in the example below. In this example, we wish to calculate the average of all those numbers that are greater than 5 present in cells A1 to A15. To obtain the result, use the AVERAGEIF formula as =AVERAGEIF(A1:A15,”>5”).

In this example there are five numbers namely 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 which are greater than 5. So the average will be calculated for the above mentioned numbers only which when calculated turns out to be 8.

Figure 7

Figure 8

So, this is how you can calculate the average of a group of numbers present in an Excel Worksheet.